How to Become a Successful Business Manager

Becoming a successful business manager is a challenging but exciting career path to take. Business managers are tasked with ensuring businesses reach their goals and as such, they have a lot of responsibilities. Every business has a different definition and responsibilities for their business manager, but at a higher level, they are tasked with ensuring that their departments progress and work at maximum efficiency. If you are interested in becoming a business manager, you will find information on how to do that and the skills you need below.

There Are Lots of Different Options for You

If you want to become a business manager, there are lots of different options and career paths available to you. For example, you might decide to become a logistics manager or even a marketing manager. Although these titles point to different aspects of business management, they are still business management positions and just some of the many options available to you.

Becoming a Business Manager

To become a business manager, you need the correct academic qualifications and experience in the particular areas you would like to focus on. 

Many companies offer business manager positions to employees who have at least a bachelor’s degree in business. However, in very competitive environments, you might need a postgraduate degree to land the position. If you want to climb the ladder faster, your best bet is to get a postgraduate degree even if the company you work for does not explicitly state that you need one to land the position. 

There are many postgraduate business programs available, including lots of different online programmes. To see all the options available to you, look at Uni Compare’s full list of degrees. They catalogue different degrees, including postgraduate business degrees, from different high-ranking universities. You can compare different universities and their rankings to find the option that works best for you.

Work Experience

In addition to the bachelor’s degree, some businesses also ask that you have some experience in the business field. The experience you have should be in the area you would like to manage; for example, some accounting or financial analysis experience. The amount of experience you need will depend on the business and the responsibilities you will handle.

Business Manager Responsibilities

Depending on the business and position, your mandate can be narrow or quite broad. The primary job of a business manager is to oversee the work of other employees while helping the business come up with and hit its goals. Besides these responsibilities, you will also be responsible for training staff. This is where your prior work experience comes into play.

As a business manager, you will also be asked to maintain and analyse financial reports, communicate with clients, staff and customers, negotiate contracts and prepare and monitor budgets.

Do keep in mind that these are the bare minimum and there might be a lot more for you to do depending on what the upper management mandates.

What Skills Do You Need?

One of the most important skills a business manager should have is the ability to lead, drive, inspire and motivate those who work under them. This they should do to ensure that the people they are responsible for do their best work. To be a motivational leader, a business manager must also have charisma and a professional demeanour about them. Both of these things go a long way in breeding trust and respect among the employees working under you. When these employees are motivated and trust and respect you, they get incentivised to go above and beyond to help the department or company reach its goals. 

You will also need strong communication skills. Strong communication skills will help you work effectively with the team you are responsible for because this skill allows you to express expectations and pass feedback onto your team. In addition to being an effective communicator, you also need to be a good listener. This will help you identify any areas where your team may be having issues as well as identify weaknesses. These communication skills also go beyond your team because you also need to be a professional and poised communicator when dealing with community officials, business leaders and upper management.

A good business manager should be decisive. They have to understand that the responsibility of making decisions for their team and on behalf of the business falls on them. Therefore, they have to be able to analyse different situations, see what options are available to them, and find a solution that works best for the business. The business manager must also be ready to make tough decisions like firing an employee or getting rid of a whole department if that is what is best for the business.

Being tech-savvy is another important skill to have. A good business manager must know their way around smartphone applications, different communications tools and other software they need to communicate with their team and third parties. Project management software, in particular, is very important in the management of the team as it will help you track tasks, progress and teammates’ responsibilities.

Keep Learning

Business managers must be willing to accept that there are people who are more experienced than them. Therefore, they must be open to learning from these people. If need be, they should find a mentor to show them the way either when they are new and/or when they need some direction along the way.

It would also be a good idea for a business manager to join a community of business leaders. Here, they can learn valuable skills which would make them better business managers. Through networking at different events hosted by these communities, they can find people to share ideas with and seek help from when they need it.

Becoming a business manager is an exciting prospect. If you want to be a successful business manager, have the right qualifications, keep learning and always do what best serves the business’s interests.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

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